Slow website? Make it speedy and quick. Here’s how

Ever wondered why all your efforts to direct traffic to your website are going in vain? There are various ways to boost traffic on your site but unless it is in prime shape, there is no chance for success. Web designing is often looked at when the bounce rates are higher but in reality, the technical aspects of the website should be considered more than anything else.

A slow website could cause serious damage to your business because it would not load in time and hence, drive users away. App development companies thrive in such situations but it would first be wise to understand mobile web development before you look at fixing a slow website.

How to test if your website is slow?

Before you reach out to a web application development company, check the speed of your site by using a few tools freely available online:

Google page speed insights: This tool will give you a clear idea as to how your website is performing on the desktop and mobile. It gives results in page running speed and provides suggestions to improve the site too. This is a detailed study to help you improve the load speed of your website; quite critical when it comes to web and mobile app development.

Pingdom website speed test: This helps you understand the speed of your website from many locations and make your site’s position clear if you are running a global website or e-com business.

Yslow: Probably one of the most common plugins in the industry today because the results are based on various parameters.

What could be slowing your website down?

Any web app development professional worth their mettle will tell you that heavy image files can ruin your website because of the time they take to load. Optimising these images would have to be the first step to make your site quick to load. It may also seem obvious but keep only mandatory files on your site; anything that is needless will only add to the load time. Most mobile app development services firms use CSS to resize/reduce an image to be used.

The most important thing that you should think about when you are speeding up your site is to avoid too many server calls. Each time you ask for a new file or redirect your site to another for any reason, there is a load on the server which invariably reduces the speed. Each and every server call is going to impact the website speed in a big way. So, for example, if you have 50 images on the site it would mean the server being called 50 different times; that’s a recipe for damage to your website.

The simplest ways to cut this number and ones used popularly by many app development services are:

Fix broken links on your website: Each time you send traffic to a page that does not exist, you are causing the server to deliver a 404 error message. This results in higher server calls and slows your website.

Cut out the redirects: Do not send traffic to a different page unless it is absolutely necessary. Many SEO experts with proficiency in app development services may claim to have pages setup for this, but if you have too many server calls you are bound to have a slower website and that is going to cause trouble to your overall user experience.

CSS image sprites are a worthy mention here since you can use CSS to provide only a specific part of a file that is needed to be shown at a particular location. That means instead of having 30 different call requests for 30 different images, you would end up doing it as one large image. Do keep the image size in mind while doing this.

Keeping your website in top condition is imperative. While the above seem like menial tasks, they may not be everyone’s cup of tea. A simple and stress-free idea would be to hire a mobile app development agency to complete the entire process for you.